


And This is Our Life Aquatic

by angelgazing



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-24
Updated: 2010-02-24
Packaged: 2017-10-07 12:53:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/65338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelgazing/pseuds/angelgazing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not easy, this doing the right thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And This is Our Life Aquatic

"I'm not," Remus says, laughing, fingers curling useless at his sides. "You're being a ponce, Sirius," he adds, book on his knees, teacup on the table, mouth pinched. There's a photograph sitting on the windowsill behind him, a snowy day and two stupid, useless boys, red-faced from the wind and laughing, arms slung around each other, burrowing close. And outside is July, heavy and oppressive, a background to Remus, sitting in jeans and a t-shirt, bare foot and glaring.

Sirius sighs, arms spread out so wide in the mouth of the kitchen that his fingers reach each side. "Says you. Everyone else, oh, they know the truth, Remus. The sad, sad, pitiful truth." Sirius leans forward, grabs a fistful of letters from the table and shakes them dramatically. "You, as anyone will tell you, are _obsessed_."

"They're letters!"

"They're twenty-seven letters," Sirius replies, and is maybe sounding a little smug. His hair is wet from the bath and it sticks to his skin like the heat does. Makes water randomly slice down his temple. He crosses his arms and pokes himself with the sharp corner of an envelope.

Remus snorts, and says, "You wrote them." Like that's got anything to do with anything, when he's using a postcard from Venice (which Sirius hated, bloody fucking _hated_, a week locked up in a tiny, tiny, room, with no Moony to distract him from the odd way the bed was too soft and the birds all swayed when they walked outside his window.) as a bookmark in his big, boring book of spells they should never need to know.

"So?" Sirius asks, his eyebrow raised daringly, smirk firmly in place, evidence very, very safe in hand.

"So," Remus answers, mouth turning at a funny angle, "those are just from the last month."

\---

Lily shoves a plant on their windowsill, with big, drooping flowers, all pink and red and dirty white, leaves spread out like hands toward the window. Obviously the plant is smart enough to know. They can't even care for themselves. She shakes her head and touches sixteen postcards with her fingertips. Sixteen in a row, spread out across the end table that wobbles under the weight of the lamp, two with girls, laughing, three with the skyline that blues with twilight outside. One says, just, "Sirius" and another says, "I don't want this to be our lives anymore. It won't quit raining here, and we've covered every surface that we've got."

"I know," Lily says, her voice soft like it is when she speaks to Harry, when she whispers her magic to James to make him still, to make him a man like Sirius doubts the rest of them will ever be, "that you've given up-"

"Nothing," Sirius tells her, mouth drawn tight with the urge to scream something completely different and all the same.

There's a card from last June, when Lily's stomach still swelled, that says in Remus' script, "It's not easy, this doing the right thing."

\---

He's sleeping, spread out and still, drooling on Sirius' pillow, hand under his cheek, snoring. Sirius cups the back of Remus' head in his palm, tests the beat of his heart with his fingertips. Sirius whispers-thumb against the dangerous curve of Remus' throat, where all his cutting words are hidden-the truth.

Remus snores, and Sirius shudders in the heat, sweat on the back of his neck, nightmares thick in his head. Sirius repeats, "I'm afraid my words aren't enough for you." And his words are clumsy-always have been-always, against the way that Remus speaks his name.

\---

Sirius crosses his fingers, crosses days off the calendar hanging on the wall. There aren't postcards or letters or telephone calls. There's nothing except days passing as he paces from place to place. From photograph to photograph, Moony in a Polaroid soaking in the bath and giving him the finger.

\---

They litter the place with letters and cards. From every place they go and every place they've been. There's a world map on their kitchen counter, with writing on the back from their hands.

Remus says, on the back of a postcard from a place called Memphis, his words sprawling out to take up all the room, "I hate everything here and all I can say in this place are lies."

Sirius shoves Glasgow aside to make room for a plate of undercooked spaghetti, and uses a ballpoint pen to wish Remus a happy drowning of his sorrows in Melbourne.

\---

They stand on the edge of August, side by side, Sirius' shoulder pressing hard against Remus, like Remus is the only thing holding him up. The sun is dropping, hanging heavy and low on the horizon in front of them, and the grass is still dry and brittle beneath them.

Harry shrieks as he laughs, broom moving under him with Prongs holding tight to his middle, Lily with her hands on her hips, watching and smiling softly, wand and healing charms at the ready. He turns around, in a wobbly circle, and some part of Sirius does wobbly things, too, like maybe this means something.

There are orders and tomorrow Remus ships out to places he can't tell Sirius the name of until later. Dumbledore said, with a gleam in his eye, that they _could_. Like it can matter, today, that Harry turned a year old. He can have chocolate cake and presents and _family_ and remind them all what they'd give up for him to see two and three and seventy-fucking-five.

They've got lemonade that's half-gone in red plastic cups that shout Happy Birthday, Harry! when you pick them up, and Peter walks around, pouring vodka into their drinks.

\---

Sirius follows him, and the only surprising thing is it took him so long. They've got too many secrets, and Sirius dreams of them at night, wakes up alone and choking, because he doesn't know where Remus is, doesn't know what he does there, when he follows Dumbledore's orders as blindly as the rest of them.

There have been too many times now, too many nights and weeks when Remus is gone and all Sirius has is letters and photographs, when Remus comes home with slow steps and bruises like he hasn't had since there was Padfoot and Prongs and Wormtail with him. And Sirius is almost certain there are places worse than alone for Remus to be, and that, more than anything, scares him.

Remus, quill in hand, sock-footed and resigned, stands in the open door of a storeroom under a pub in Alberta, arms crossed against the chill of night, against the pounding of Muggles, stomping on the floor above him with thick boots and heavy feet. He doesn't smile, just shakes his head, like he expected Sirius to show up all along, dragging in drunk on victory and shivering.

"You know," Sirius says, fingers shaking against Remus' cheek, his neck, his shoulder, his belly. "You know," he repeats, thumb catching in the valley of Remus' hip, where it's always been most comfortable. "I couldn't- I thought about it all night, while you were sleeping, and I couldn't remember what I was supposed to say this time. You keep leaving, and I keep leaving, and there're too many fucking words, Remus, that don't mean a thing. It's fucking freezing here, when the sun goes down, isn't it? I'm tired of hearing about the weather. I love you, and I don't know how you want me to say it."

\---

The bed shakes when they fall on it, and Sirius hits his knee on the hard frame with enough force to make him yelp, his hands under Remus' too-big t-shirt, utterly graceless. Remus laughs, fingers in Sirius' hair, mouth at Sirius' chin, his jaw, the corner of his mouth-still twisted with swearing-with sloppy, open-mouthed kisses.

Sirius growls, unhappily, taking a hand from Remus to put on the bed, and the bed moves, shapes itself around his hand and knee and elbow, cradles Remus, softly, and rocks.

"What the bloody fuck?" Sirius asks, half-chokes, when Remus' teeth scrape against his throat-because safe house beds are always horrible, but this is a new level of awful that even Sirius can't grasp. He falls against Remus and they sway with the bed like rowboats at sea.

"Water," Remus says, smiling against Sirius' shoulder, out of breath and almost, maybe, nearing the verge of laughter.

"What?" Sirius sighs, leans up with his elbows on either side of Remus' head, and kisses him because he's been dying to do that for days, it seems like, and groping in doorways does not count.

He laughs and the bed shakes beneath them. "Stop talking."

\---

He takes a picture of Remus sleeping, bruise on his cheek, cut on his thigh, eyebrows furrowed while he's fucking _sleeping_, and he regrets leaving, regrets coming back, regrets a hundred thousand fucking things, on his knees on the floor by their bed. This isn't what home is, not really, just what it's supposed to be, Remus splayed across the same bed that Sirius sleeps in, hands tucked under his chin as he dreams.

Sirius takes a picture, and as it bleeds to life he sighs, writes on the back, "You stubborn twat. I hate all of this. It's morning."

\---

Remus has a postcard from Alberta as a bookmark. A boy and his dog on the front, crouched down with hats pulled over their ears, smiling. It doesn't say anything on the back, and Sirius steals it-loses Remus' place-and sticks it on the refrigerator with a reindeer magnet.

\---

Sirius watches, shoulder against the doorframe, as Remus sits in the tub. His legs are too long, knobby knees poking out of the bubbles, fingers hooked over the edge, curled, dripping water onto a dirty towel. Steam rises up, off the water, off his skin. Summer's bleeding to autumn outside the window, and Remus is going to boil himself, rate he's going, just to try and get _warm_.

"You could tell me," Sirius says, as the mirror fogs. "Dumbledore be damned."

Remus laughs when he says, "You're daft, you know. Thinking I don't break the rules at all for you."

\---

It's snowing outside and Sirius hasn't been home since a week last Thursday. He's got a postcard in his pocket-next to a picture of the two of them, sighing, at Harry's birthday party, shouting cups in their hands as they lean against a tree-from the first of September, a train on its tracks and too many words to fit right on the back. He hasn't seen an owl in days.

Sirius paces the floors of the safe house he's stuck in, been stuck in for too long now, because of hissings in the streets of traitors and the deaths that they're all powerless to stop. The floor squeaks with every step he takes, and squeaks and squeaks and moans, loudly, like saying, _knock it off, would you?_

Peter squeaks too, sitting in an armchair with giant flowers on it, gnawing at his thumb with his front teeth like a rat. He flinches when Sirius looks at him, like a coward would, shrinks back in the chair like he can hide.

The whole place spells of cat piss and week old curry-of rubbish and coffee grounds from months of one-night guests.

Sirius has never hated a place more.

\---

He dreams-back home, arm tucked under his head, forehead on the back of Remus' neck, nose pressed against the knob at the top of Remus' spine for warmth, under mountains of blankets with the window open to the night outside-of floating, of beds in Alberta and the way they swish, like the way that Lily walked when she found out what it did to Prongs, seductive and soothing as it sways. Remus beside him, his steady breathing saying more than he does.

Sirius dreams of his hand on Remus' hip, and the way it curves meaning comfort under his palm the way Remus' letters do on the back of photographs, when he writes _Sirius&amp;Remus_ and there's no space between them.

And Remus is covered in words, if you look right. In the right light, his fingers say _grace_. The soft underside of his jaw, rough with stubble at odd hours of the morning, where Sirius likes best to put his mouth, says _hope_. Remus' toes, curled against Sirius' shin, say _comfort_. The curve of his belly reads _care_, in soft, careful, curving letters. The places where Sirius can put his fingers and not be bitten by the sharpness of Remus' ribs through his skin, those say, _yes_. They say _trust_ and _happy_, in the places where there's less hollow.

And Sirius dreams of laughing, there, floating on water in paper-thin rowboats with oars that've long since fallen overboard, because he could drown, maybe, but only in Remus, and the way his hands cup Sirius' face, like something else, a word Sirius can't catch, not this close up. He dreams that the boat rocks, soothes them. And the words that cover Remus don't mean anything, really. He's covered in words that won't save them from drifting out to sea.


End file.
